Her Majesty's Secret Service

The intelligence service made famous by James Bond used to be ruthless in pursuit of British interests. These days, it seems to have succumbed to political correctness.

By

Andrew Roberts

Jan. 13, 2013 6:54 p.m. ET

Easily the most pervasive and dangerous of all the modern conspiracy theories is the one claiming that President
George W. Bush
and British Prime Minister Tony Blair knew that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before nevertheless deciding to invade in 2003. No other misrepresentation in recent times has so damaged the trust between government and the governed. How gratifying, therefore, that as authoritative and respected a commentator as Gordon Corera explodes that myth completely in "The Art of Betrayal," a wide-ranging, thought-provoking and highly readable history of Britain's postwar Secret Intelligence Service, popularly known as MI6.

"Blair was sure that Iraq was developing WMD because his spies believed it always had been," states Mr. Corera, the security correspondent for the BBC. "After the first Gulf War of 1991, MI6, the CIA and UN weapons inspectors had combed over the wreckage of Iraq and had been shocked to find Saddam had been much closer to building a nuclear bomb behind their backs. They vowed never to be caught out again, overlooking the fact that that they had also over-estimated Saddam's stockpile of chemical agents." Furthermore, "Bush and Blair were also receiving secret intelligence briefings about the Pakistani nuclear salesman A.Q. Khan offering countries instructions and parts to make a nuclear bomb." If journalism is the first draft of history, then serious and substantial books like Mr. Corera's are the second. Ultimately history will show that Messrs. Bush and Blair made the correct decision, given what was genuinely believed at the time.

"The Art of Betrayal" opens among the shadowy streets of Vienna of 1945. One can almost hear the strains of Anton Karas's zither from the soundtrack of "The Third Man" as iconic MI6 agents such as Daphne Park and Harold "Shergy" Shergold do battle against the likes of Kim Philby and the other British traitors. It was Shergold who eventually broke George Blake, the spy whose treachery led to the loss of no fewer than 500 agents, many of whom were executed by the Russians. Daphne Park's later experiences in the Congo in the 1950s and early 1960s will have you biting your fingernails, as she saves the lives of innocents (as well as intelligence sources) through sheer chutzpah and British self-possession.

Mr. Corera is interesting on the interaction between MI6 and popular fiction, with James Bond cropping up no fewer than 11 times, and John le Carré 21. The image of the service has been immeasurably altered by the spy-fiction literary gene, the author argues, with life imitating art to a degree unimaginable in any other department of state. As one former MI6 chief told a friend of mine: "We never used to talk about 'safehouses,' 'dead-letter drops' and 'Moscow Circus' before [John le Carré's] George Smiley; nowadays we talk about little else."

ENLARGE

The Art of Betrayal

By Gordon Corera (Pegasus, 481 pages, $35)

Yet even Ian Fleming would have been pushed to have come up with MI6's real ideas for killing the Egyptian dictator Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s with exploding razors and poison gas. To guard against the latter, the KGB gave Nasser a caged bird on the model of the canary in the mineshaft. Mr. Corera is predictably scathing about this particular "license to kill," but when one considers the devastating effect that the 1956 Suez Crisis had on Britain's global standing—effectively ending its great-power status and imperial pretensions—it is easy to understand British Prime Minister Anthony Eden's demand to MI6: "I want Nasser murdered, don't you understand?"

The Arab hyper-nationalism that Nasser championed ultimately led to far greater problems to the United States even than to Britain, and one exploding razor back in 1956 might have even obviated the need to invade Iraq 35 years later. Mr. Corera notes that, today, new entrants to MI6 are told in their training that assassination is "not countenanced and the subject is not up for debate." One wonders why not: A well-timed bullet for A.Q. Khan would have been perfectly justifiable.

There are only six countries in the world that run global intelligence networks, and Britain's is the only one so politically correct as not to have a license to kill. What must the CIA's drone-managers—or Russia's secret-service murderers of the former KGB officer turned whistleblower Alexander Litvinenko, or the Mossad unit that is now heroically killing off Iranian genocide-scientists in Teheran—think of their wimpy British counterparts?

The new MI6 fastidiousness goes beyond ridding the world of monsters. "If we know or believe action by us will lead to torture taking place," states the present MI6 chief, John Sawers, "we're required by UK and international law to avoid that action. And we do, even though that allows the terrorist action to go ahead." Mr. Corera, whose contacts in the service are the envy of every other security correspondent in London, adds that British spooks will privately admit that, in the past, "the leads that emerged out of torture in the black sites were important for national security" and that it's simply wrong to state that torture always leads to flawed intelligence. "And they ask, can you imagine the witch-hunt and the blame game if there were to be an attack on Britain tomorrow and it was found that intelligence from, say, the Saudis had been declined because of concerns over its provenance?"

This well-written, hard-hitting book—full of, as one footnotes states, "private information from an individual who, unsurprisingly, requested anonymity"—shows that MI6 has never in the past put its own conscience before its duty to protect the public. It mustn't start now.

Mr. Roberts's latest book is "Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War."

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